Talk:Battle of Dien Bien Phu

Fall, etc.

Since I don't read French, did you mean to make Navarre vNavarre?

Fall wrote extensively. Yes, Street without Joy is probably his best known, but Hell in a Very Small Place is explicitly about Dien Bien Phu. As you may know, Fall died in combat, while doing field research with U.S. units during the war. He also published a number of papers; while some were for the U.S. government, he did regard many of the senior U.S. politicians and planners as idiots, and, in a reasonably polite way, told them so.

I'm actively writing this article; by my side are Giap's book that does have its propaganda aspect, but also Moore & Galloway's 2008 book in which they met with Vo Nguyen Giap (still alive, AFAIK), and then walked the battlefield. There are a variety of other sources online but with such things as translations of North Vietnamese works.

The Viet Minh side is actually fairly well documented in the literature of unconventional warfare, growing amounts of which are available online in primary form. In many ways, it is considered a textbook example of how not to fight a battle, at least from the French standpoint. Even so, Giap told Galloway and Moore that he had violated Party orders in a number of ways that I'll be including. Howard C. Berkowitz 04:37, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Sounds interesting. I'll keep looking in. the vNavarre is a typo -- when I was first editing, the text ran about a million miles to the right in a single line for some reason. It was v. difficult to edit.... Finally I Previewed it and the text reformatted itself. Computers are *weird*.... Hayford Peirce 05:17, 25 November 2008 (UTC)